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The Lebanese scholar Fadi Bardawil once told me that the value of digging up Lebanon's left-wing heritage is to serve as "an intergenerational conversation," to explore the successes and failures of a previous generation to help inform the younger ones. He also described it in archeological terms, as "excavating the experiences" of left-wing groups of the past.11 Bardawil suggests that the people whose thoughts he excavates believed that their own theoretical investigations and readings "were geared towards an intervention in the present."12 This is of crucial importance because, as we see in We Were Communists, whatever Left futurities they were proposing were unable to withstand internal contradictions within parties like the LCP in the face of either nationalism, sectarianism or Islamism.13 Exploring these contradictions by digging up the relevant archives can be really useful for us to learn from their experiences and understand what went wrong.